Driving down the road while only looking in the rearview mirror … that gives you a good idea of where you’ve been, but unless the road behind you is exactly like the one in front of you, you may run into some obstacles, to put it mildly. Safe and effective driving means looking forward and
UX research and UX measurement can be seen as an extension of experimental design. At the heart of experimental design lie variables. Earlier we wrote about different kinds of variables. In short, dependent variables are what you get (outcomes), independent variables are what you set, and extraneous variables are what you can’t forget (to account
Every year, it seems, there’s a new buzz word or a hot new method that comes up in UX research and product development: Agile, Lean, and Jobs to be Done are just a few. Design Thinking is a concept that’s received a lot of attention lately. But well before Design Thinking became part of the
Important decisions should be informed by data. And one of the most common ways of displaying data is by using graphs to better visualize relationships. Graphs can be powerful tools to compactly illustrate patterns. But the type of graph and the visual elements selected can lead to (usually) unintentional misinterpretation. For example, we have written
If you have the budget and time to test with fifteen users, it’s better to break up those fifteen into three groups and make changes between rounds than test all fifteen in one round before making any changes. When you see a user struggle to complete a task because of a poorly labeled field or
One of these things is not like the other. That’s the theme of a segment on the long-running US TV show Sesame Street. As children, we learn to identify similarities and differences. And after seeing a group of things that look similar, we tend to remember the differences. Why? Well, one theory describes something called
Human: Computer, can you recognize speech? Computer: I think you said, can you wreck a nice beach? Both the quality of synthesized speech and the capability of communicating with a computer using your voice have come a long way since the debut of this technology in the 1970s. One of the most famous synthetic voices
Who, as a person, doesn’t want to be desirable? And if you’re in the business of developing products or services, who doesn’t want those to be desirable? There is a deep satisfaction beyond the monetary rewards of providing something that people want (and of course, the money’s nice, too). While we’ve found wide interest in
We’ve written extensively about the System Usability Scale (SUS). It’s the most widely used and cited questionnaire for measuring the perception of the user experience. But likely the second most widely used and cited questionnaire, with over 2,000 citations, is the Post Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ). It also goes by the name of Computer
In an earlier article, we reviewed five competing models of delight. The models differed in their details, but most shared the general idea that delight is composed of an unexpected positive experience. Or, for the most part, delight is a pleasant surprise. However, there is disagreement on whether you actually need surprise to be delighted.
